Devices and Desires e-1

by K. J. Parker

  He rode with only his squire for company as far as the Horsefair, where he was joined by half a dozen mounted men in full armour, hurrying because they were running late. They slowed down when they saw it was him; one of them joked that he must've got the time wrong, because he was sure the muster had been set for half an hour earlier.

  At the gate he found everybody else waiting for him. Cousin Jarnac had apparently assumed temporary command in his absence. Jarnac, of course, looked the part so much more than he did. The battle harness of the lesser Ducas was blued spring steel, with a single-piece placket instead of the coat of plates, and a bevored sallet with an eighteen-inch boiled leather crest in the form of a crouching boar. If he hadn't known better he'd have followed Jarnac unquestioningly; so, he suspected, would everybody else.

  All told, the armoured contingent numbered over four hundred; the rest of his army was made up of five hundred mounted archers and eight hundred lancers, middleweight-heavy cavalry in munition-grade black-and-white half-armour. Dawn was soaking through the dark blue sky, and a trace of mist hung round the main gate as, feeling horribly self-conscious about his appearance, horsemanship and perceived lack of any leadership ability whatsoever, Miel Ducas led the way out of the city and down the long road to the valley floor.

  Because they were late starting, there was nothing for it but to take the old carters' road, Castle Lane, round the side of the hog's back crossed by the main road. That would save an hour, assuming it wasn't blocked by a landslide or fallen trees, and they'd come out five hundred yards from the fork where the Packhorse Drove branched off. The drove would take them down into the wooded combe that ran parallel to the road; at the Merebarton (assuming it wasn't a swamp after the late rain) they'd split into two and try and bottle the enemy up in the Blackwater Pass. Even if everything went perfectly they'd only be able to hold the two ends of the pass for a short while, but every Mezentine they killed today was one they wouldn't have to deal with later. At the council of war where the plan had been discussed, someone had described this approach as trying to empty a river with a tablespoon. Thinking about it, it had been Miel himself who said that, and nobody had contradicted him.

  Castle Lane proved to be reasonably clear, and they made good time. Halfway down Packhorse Drove, however, they came almost within long bowshot of an enemy scouting party, who took one look at them and galloped away. Disaster; if the scouts got back to the main army, the whole plan would be ruined. Miel's first instinct was to send a half-squadron of lancers after them, but fortunately he didn't give in to it. God only knew how the enemy were managing to raise a gallop on the rock-and-mud surface of the drove; their horses must have iron hoofs and no bones in their legs. Trying to catch them or match their pace would be impossible for mere mortal horses, and the fewer men he sent charging around the landscape at this stage, the better. The only thing for it was to cut up diagonally across the rough to the road instead of taking the deer-trails he'd planned on using. That way, with luck, his men would stay between the scouts and their army, so they wouldn't be able to deliver their message. They'd come up a quarter-mile away from the gates of the canyon on the south side, but (with more luck) they'd be able to close that distance before the enemy got there. The northern wing would have to take its time getting into position. First screw-up of the day, Miel acknowledged sourly, and highly unlikely to be the last.

  Cutting across the rough sounded fine when you said it, briskly and confidently, to your cool, eager staff officers. Putting the order into practice was something else entirely. Even the perfectly trained and schooled horses of the Ducas house weren't happy about leaving the path and crashing about through holly and briars; for the most part, the archers' and lancers' horses followed where the knights led, but it could only have been out of bewildered curiosity. Above all, they made a racket that surely could've been heard in the city. Only one man actually fell off and hurt himself, but he was the lesser Nicephorus, an enormous man in full plate, and the crash bounced about among the trees like a small bird trapped in a barn.

  Coming out of the forest on to the road and into the light was a terrifying experience. Very reluctantly, but with duty forcing him on like a jailer, Miel led the way and was the first to break cover. He expected yells, movement, a flurry of arrows, but he had the road to himself. He reined in his horse and stood quite still for a moment or so, feeling as though he was the last man on earth. He could hear no birds singing, not even a bee or a horsefly, and it occurred to him that the enemy had already been and gone. But a glance at the road set his mind at rest; no hoofmarks, footprints, wheel-tracks to be seen.

  Which reminded him. He turned in the saddle and waved his men on, then rode back to intercept one of the line officers, a man he trusted.

  'Have the rearguard remembered to cut some branches?' he asked. He realised while he was saying it that the branch-cutting detail weren't this officer's responsibility; but he nodded and said yes, he'd watched them doing it, and did the Ducas want him to go back and make sure it was all done right?

  Miel had absolute confidence in his subordinates, but even so he hung back and watched as the rearguard tied cut branches to the pommels of their saddles and dragged them behind as they rode on, sweeping away the column's hoof-prints. The result didn't look right, but it was less obvious than the tracks of a thousand horses.

  He remembered the canyon, though it was several years since the last time he'd been there, hunting late-season wolves with Jarnac and the Sphax twins. On that occasion the place had played cruelly on his nerves, because he hadn't yet got the hang of not being at war with the Vadani and therefore constantly at risk from maverick raiding parties, and because anybody with more imagination than a small rock could see it was a perfect place for an ambush. He started worrying; the enemy commander was by definition a professional soldier, trained from childhood to spot dangerous terrain. Surely he'd have recognised the risk from his scouts' reports. Either he wouldn't show up at all, which would be horribly embarrassing, or else he'd figured out an ingenious counter-ambush of his own that'd leave the Eremians trapped in their own snare. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it was that that was precisely what was about to happen. At any moment, archers would appear on the skyline, or the sun would disappear behind a curtain of falling scorpion bolts. Maybe he'd be lucky and die in the first volley, thereby spared the humiliating pain of knowing he'd led the flower of Eremian chivalry to a pointless, shameful death…

  I'm turning into Orsea, he thought. Maybe it's something that comes with being in charge. As his men filed past, he scanned the top of the ridge on both sides. If there was an ambush waiting up there, they'd missed their chance. He'd got away with it after all.

  Once they'd taken up position at the canyon neck, there was a great deal to be done. The lancers dismounted and started felling trees to build the roadblock, while the designated specialists in each unit unloaded and spread the caltrops and snagging wires they'd brought with them from the city. Miel couldn't recall offhand whose suggestion the caltrops had been, though he had a nasty feeling it'd been his. They were crude, put together in a hurry; a wooden ball the size of a large apple, with eight two-inch spikes sticking out in all directions. Wouldn't it be the most delicate irony if the battle turned against him and those spikes ended up buried in the frogs of his own horses' hoofs, as a painful lesson in poetic justice to anybody who presumed to use weapons of indiscriminate effect against the Mezentines?

  Once the preparations had been made, he pulled all his men back into cover, and settled down to wait. He knew this would be the hardest part of the job, a lethal opportunity to shred his own self-confidence to the point where he'd order the retreat sounded the moment a single Mezentine appeared in the distance. He almost wished he was the one being ambushed, since at least he wouldn't have to cope with the anticipation.

  When the enemy finally arrived, of course, he was looking the other way. Worse; he was on foot, in a small holly grove, taking a last pre-ba
ttle piss. He heard the creak of an axle, followed by shouting; more shouting, as he fumbled numbly with his trousers (no mean feat of engineering for a man wearing plate cuisses) and battled his way out of the holly, stumbling on exposed roots and fallen branches as he tried to get back to where he'd left his horse. He mounted badly, twisting his ankle as he lifted into the saddle, winding himself as he sat down. There were screams among the shouts now, and a clattering of steel like blacksmiths trying to work the metal too cold. For a split second his sense of direction deserted him and he couldn't remember where the battle was.

  His horse scrambled awkwardly out on to the road, and there was nobody there; he turned his head in time to see the last of his men joining in a full-blown charge. They could've waited for me, he thought, unfairly and incorrectly; he followed them, a shamefaced rearguard of one. Before he reached them he passed five dead men and nine sprawled horses, all Eremians. Wonderful omen.

  Immediately he saw what the problem was. Quite properly, whoever had taken command while he was away urinating had seen an opening in the enemy front and thrown a full charge at it. Also quite reasonably, he hadn't expected the level of success that in the event he'd achieved. The charge had gone home and then gone too far, like an unbarred spear into a charging boar. The risk now was of being enveloped from the sides. Miel looked round in desperation for the horn-blower to sound the disengage. He found him almost straight away; lying on the ground, covered from the waist down by his fallen horse. He was dead, of course; and the horn lay beside him where he'd dropped it. At least one horse had trodden on it, crumpling it up like stiff paper.

  Not so good, then. He sat still, frantically trying to decide what to do, painfully aware that the battle had slipped away from him, like a cat squirming out of a child's arms. Common sense urged him to stay out of the fighting, but he was the Ducas, and his place was in the thick of it. Muttering to himself, he pushed his horse into a half-hearted canter and, as something of an afterthought, drew his sword.

  A horseman was closing on him; not an Eremian, therefore an enemy. He spurred forward to meet him, but the rider swerved away. Miel realised he was an archer, one of the Cure Hardy scouts. He pulled his horse's head round, determined to be at least a moving target, but the enemy was more concerned with getting away; he had his bow in his right hand and his left was on the reins. Before Miel could decide whether or not to do anything about him, the archer slumped forward on his horse's neck, dropped his bow and slid sideways out of the saddle. His foot snagged in his stirrup-leather just as his head hit the ground. His helmet came off and a tangle of long, dark hair flowed out like blood from a wound. He was being dragged. With each stride of the horse his head was jerked up, only to bump down again and bounce off a stone or the lip of a pothole. After a few yards, the horse slowed down; his foot came free from the stirrup, he rolled over a couple of times and came to rest. The side of his head was white with dust, like a fine lady's face-powder, blood blotting through it in a round patch, like blusher. The stub of a broken-off arrow stuck out of his neck, just above the rolled edge of his breastplate.

  Miel looked up. He'd forgotten that, as he was moving into position, he'd dismounted his own archers and sent them to command the tops of the ridges that flanked the road. His own tactical skill impressed him. His archers were already in position, and because the attacking cavalry had forced the enemy out of the way and over to the sides, they had a clear view with minimal risk of dropping stray shots into their own men. If he'd planned it that way, it would have been a clever and imaginative tactic. Planned or not, though, the archers had turned a potential disaster into the makings of a famous victory. The arrows were driving the enemy back into the centre of the canyon, where they were coming up against the Eremian cavalry; crushed between arrows and lances, like ears of wheat between two grindstones, they were gradually being ground away. In the distance he heard louder, shriller yells, from which he gathered that battle had been joined on the other side of the canyon.

  It is incumbent upon the Ducas always to fight in the front rank, always to be the best… Query, however: is the Ducas obliged to fight in the front rank even if nobody's watching? The battle was coming along very nicely without him, thanks to the timely intervention of the archers, and the sheer aggression of the horsemen. The charge had long since foundered and lost all its momentum. The knights and lancers were no longer moving. Instead they were standing in their stirrups, bashing down on the helmets and coats of plates of the enemy infantry, who were too tightly cramped together to be able to swing back at them with anything approaching lethal force. With a considerable degree of reluctance, he pushed his horse forward into the fighting.

  It reminded him of a thrush cracking snail-shells against a stone. His fellow knights were whirling and swinging their swords, flattening their delicately honed edges against the cheap munitions plate of the enemy footsoldiers. Even the swords of the Phocas, the Suidas, the Peribleptus couldn't cut into sixteenth-inch domed iron sheet. Farm tools or hammers would probably have been more use, but noblemen didn't use such things. Instead, they tried to club the enemy to the floor with their light, blunt swords; it was perfectly possible, provided you hit hard enough and took pains to land your blows on the same spot. Cursing the aimless stupidity of it all, Miel Ducas dug his spurs into his horse's side and forced the poor creature into a clumsy, unwilling canter.

  He saw the enemy. Things weren't going well with them. Tidemarks of dead bodies showed where they'd tried to scramble up the slope to get at the archers, only to find out by trial and error that it couldn't be done. Instead, they'd tried to go back, and that, presumably, was when they'd discovered that the other end of the canyon was blocked. There were thousands of them, all the scouts had agreed on that, but just now their vast weight of numbers was working against them. Jammed together as their flanks cringed away from the archers, most of them were useless to their commander; they were a traffic jam, obstructing the passage of orders and intelligence from one end of the canyon to the other. It occurred to Miel that if he'd only had another couple of thousand men, he could probably kill enough of them from this position to end the war. But that wasn't the case; and at any moment, the sheer pressure of men trying to get away from the spearhead of knights wedged into their centre would explode up the canyon sides and flush away his archers, albeit with devastating loss of life… Entirely against his will and better judgement, he spared a moment to consider that. Ever since childhood he'd trained with weapons, as a nobleman should; he'd fought with the quintain and the pell, sparred with his instructors, shot arrows into targets both stationary and moving. In due course he'd put the theory into practice, against the Vadani, in what proved to be the last campaign of the war, and afterwards in border skirmishes and police actions against brigands and free companies. All his life he'd learned to fight a target-a wooden post wrapped in sacking, a sack dangling from a swinging beam, a straw circle with coloured rings painted on it, an exposed neck or forearm, the gap beside the armpit not covered by the armour plates. It hadn't ever worried him, until now. He paused to consider how deeply troubled he was, now that he was in command, and all these deaths and mutilations were by his order and decision. It troubled him, he discovered, but not enough.

  Devastating loss of life; the sides of the canyon could be covered with dead men, packed close enough together that if it rained, the dust wouldn't get wet, and it'd still only be three thousand dead, maybe four, and that wouldn't be enough to end the war or even affect it significantly. It was an extraordinary thought; he could litter the landscape as far as the eye could see with the most grotesque obscenities he could imagine, and it wouldn't actually matter all that much, in the great scheme of things. He considered the duty of the Ducas, and the beneficial effect on morale that the sight of their commander in the thick of the fighting would have on his men, and thought, to hell with that. He'd had enough. What he needed most of all was a horn-blower.

  What he got was a couple of Mezentines. Tw
o infantrymen who'd squeezed and wriggled their way past, through, under, over the heaped corpses of their friends were running towards him, yelling what he assumed was abuse. Dispassionately, he assessed them from the technical point of view. Their defences consisted of kettle-hats, mail collars and padded jacks reaching just below the waist. They were armed with some form of halberd (were those glaives or bardisches? He ought to know, but he always got them mixed up). Calm, determined and properly trained in the orthodox school of fencing they'd be formidable opponents, worthy of six pages of detailed drawings and explanatory text in the manual. As it was, they were a chore.

  He rode at them, pulled left at the last moment, overshot the neck with a lazy thrust and severed the appropriate vein with a long, professional draw-cut. He felt blood on his face, which saved him the bother of turning his head to look. He could, of course, let the other man go, but that would be failing in his duty. He stopped his horse, dragged its head round and rode down the second man, hamstringing him with a delicate flick of the wrist as he passed him on the right. As chores went it hadn't exactly been arduous, but he felt annoyed, imposed upon; he was a busy man with a battle to stop, and he didn't have time for indulgences.

  He found a horn-blower and ordered the disengage followed by the withdrawal in good order. The horn-blower looked at him before he blew. The effect was immediate. The archers vanished from the ridgetops, the knights and lancers wheeled and cantered away, leaving the butchered, stunned enemy staring after them. Pursuit, he knew, wouldn't be an issue. He asked the horn-blower if there was a recognised call for 'back the way we came'. Apparently there was.